I’d prefer to have met Strachey’s work first in this book rather than in Eminent Victorians (1918). Then the best would have been still to come. As it was, I first read Eminent Victorians, then sought out more of his work and was disappointed. Victoria (1921) is dull, Elizabeth and Essex (1928) duller.

The Shorter Strachey is much better than those two. Indeed, one short essay on Lodowick Muggleton is worthy to stand beside the long essay on Cardinal Manning that opens Eminent Victorians. This is very good writing:

Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650. Then it was that the disintegration of religious authority which had begun with Luther reached its culminating point. The Bible, containing the absolute truth as to the nature and the workings of the Universe, lay open to all; it was only necessary to interpret its assertions; and to do so all that was wanted was the decision of the individual conscience. In those days the individual conscience decided with extraordinary facility. Prophets and prophetesses ranged in crowds through the streets of London, proclaiming, with complete certainty, the explanation of everything. The explanations were extremely varied: so much the better — one could pick and choose. One could become a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a Traskite, a Tryonist, a Philadelphian, a Christadelphian, or a Seventh Day Baptist, just as one pleased. Samuel Butler might fleer and flout at

petulant, capricious sects,
The maggots of corrupted texts;

but he, too, was deciding according to the light of his individual conscience. By what rule could men determine whether a text was corrupted, or what it meant? The rule of the Catholic Church was gone, and henceforward Eternal Truth might with perfect reason be expected to speak through the mouth of any fish-wife in Billingsgate. (“Muggleton”, inPortraits in Miniature, 1931)

Elsewhere, Strachey writes well but not exceptionally on subjects as varied as Voltaire and Frederick the Great, the acting of Sarah Bernhardt, the humour of Dostoevsky, and his own life. He’s witty, perceptive, and, in the autobiographical pieces at least, unblushingly candid. His day-description “Monday June 26th 1916”, in which he longs for a flyweight boxer in the Daily Mirror and tries to realize a daydream of seducing “that young postman with the fair hair and lovely country complexion who had smiled at me and said ‘Good evening, sir’, as he passed on his bicycle”, couldn’t have been published in his lifetime.

Which didn’t last long. It began in 1880 and ended in 1932. There were big changes in those five decades and Strachey was at the heart of some of them. Eminent Victorians was an important book, part of the revolt against the old order provoked by the slaughter and futility of the First World War, but it wouldn’t have been so successful if it hadn’t been so well-written.

You’ll see here that Strachey was rebelling against part of himself: there’s Victorian stodginess in some of the essays and reviews, even if they were written after Eminent Victorians. But “Muggleton” is as light as a soufflé. It’s also affectionate rather than acid. It would have been a foretaste of literary bliss, if I’d read this book first.

I’d didn’t, but you should if you don’t know Strachey. If you do, you’ll learn a lot more about him here. There are also glimpses of others in the Bloomsbury Set, like Ottoline Morrell and Dora Carrington. And The Shorter Strachey closes with four essays on French literature and culture, which were both very important to Strachey. The French writer Jean Giradoux supplies his epitaph: « Seuls les médiocres sont toujours à leur meilleur. » – “Only the mediocre are always at their best.” Strachey wasn’t mediocre and wasn’t always at his best. But he got there in “Muggleton” and got close elsewhere in this book.

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Vox Day (Castalia House 2015)

If Vox Day didn’t exist, Social Justice Warriors wouldn’t want to invent him. Indeed, they wouldn’t be able to imagine him: a white racist, sexist and homophobe who isn’t just more intelligent, more knowledgeable and wittier than they are, but isn’t actually white. As he delights in telling them: he’s part Hispanic and part American Indian. Like Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay conservative who supplies the introduction for this book, Vox Day is a living refutation of the Social Justice Weltanschauung.

That’s part of why they hate him so much. You’ll understand the rest by reading SJWs Always Lie. He understands them much better than they understand him. In fact, they don’t understand him at all. That’s why he’s so effective in his attacks on them and they’re so ineffective in theirs on him. SJWs certainly win many battles, but many more of their victims might survive if they have a copy of this book to guide them. The number one rule is: Never apologize. The Nobel Laureates James Watson and Sir Tim Hunt and the Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich disobeyed that rule and paid the price:

Watson’s apology could not have been more abject. Eich’s sincerity and abasement before the thought police could not have been more genuine or more groveling. Hunt’s apology could not have come quicker. Yet none of them proved sufficient to even marginally reduce the amount of social pressure the SJWs continued to bring to bear on them – pressure that none of them proved able to successfully withstand. (ch. 3, “When SJWs Attack”, pg. 72)

SJWs say they want to make the world a cleaner, kinder, caringer place. In fact, they want power. Which means, inter alia, the power to humiliate and destroy people who are superior to them. Orwell described another aspect of their psychology like this:

Sometimes I look at a Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

Unfortunately, Day’s writing isn’t as powerful and effective as Orwell’s. SJWs Always Lie isn’t badly written or painful to read, but it’s by no means as well-written and pleasurable as it could have been. The cartoons by Red Meat that begin each chapter are often crisper and clearer than the prose that follows. As Orwell points out in “Politics and the English Language” (1946): “When you are composing in a hurry … it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.” And Day certainly wrote this book in a hurry: I feel tired merely contemplating the amount he gets done not just as a writer but as a blogger, editor, gamer, and networker too.

Those are more reasons for SJWs to hate him. As a self-professed Christian, he shouldn’t hate them back and I think he mostly succeeds. But I also think he’s more Christianized than Christian. He’s pagan and aristocratic in his values, not humble or pacific. Nietzsche and Aristotle are much more apparent in his thinking and writing than Christ or St Paul: I can’t remember seeing “Molon labe, motherfuckers” in the Sermon on the Mount. But I have seen it at Day’s blog. If you visit the blog regularly, SJWs Always Lie will be reinforcement, not revelation, but by buying the book you support a very worthy cause. If one Vox Day can win endorsements like the following, imagine what ten or a hundred could do:

“Vox Day is one sick puppy.” – Dr. P.Z. Myers, PhD.

“Vox Day is a fascist mega-dickbag and less a human being than one long sequence of junk DNA.” – Dr. Phil Sandifer, PhD.

The answer to that last question is: the cuckservatives. A man isn’t known just by the company he keeps, but also by the opprobrium he heaps. After the SJWs, who better for Day to assail than the pseudo-conservatives of the Republican party? Like Nietzsche, Vox Day would be impossible to imagine if he didn’t exist. That’s why he’s memorable and that’s why he evokes such strong reactions, positive and negative. SJWs always lie and SJWs will always hate Vox Day. He wouldn’t want it any other way.

It’s been said that you’ll have more success juggling jelly than you will predicting what TransVisceral Books will come up with next. It’s hard to disagree. From Miriam Stimbers’ unnatural history of the backside to Sam Salatta’s pop-up book of serial slaying, TransVisceral are continually expanding their readers’ horizons, coming out of left field like a great white on steroid-stoked roller-blades, swinging a lead-weighted pool-cue that’s guaranteed to knock you for 6-6-6.

With Diaspora, they’ve just done it again. It was a major coup to secure the polymorphously perverse partnership of David and Linda Kerekes as editors for this book. Not only have they harvested contributions from a host of big names – the aforementioned Stimbers and Salatta, to name but two – they’ve penned memorably mephitic contributions of their own. David traces the roots of his key commitment to counter-culturality to his outsider status as son of a refugee from communist Eastern Europe. But, as ever, he finds plenty of chuckles amid the autobiographical analysis. Here he is recalling some never-forgotten advice from his mother Mirima:

Mom looked at me with uncharacteristic severity, emphasizing her words by waggling her tomato-stained forefinger: “A true gypsy don’t never lie, don’t never steal and don’t never ’it a woman, Davitschko,” she said. “You always remember that, eh? But most of all,” she went on with a sudden twinkle in her eye, “a true gypsy don’t never get caught!” I laughed, nodded and knew that I had been initiated into another of Mom’s home-country secrets. (“Gyppo Kiddo: My Life in the Roma Diaspora”, pg. 356)

Elsewhere, Linda Kerekes describes another kind of migration and another kind of diaspora: travel across the tightly policed, but highly ambiguous, border between so-called “male” and “female”, so-called “man” and so-called “woman”. Her descriptions of her gender-reassignment surgery are not for the faint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach, but they help make this book even more impactful and even more esoteric. TransVisceral have come up trumps again, unleashing another vibrantly visceral beacon that will sink its turbo-charged talons deep into the post-normative underbelly of your subconscious.

I’ve never spent a wet Sunday in Hartlepool during a power-cut. Honest. You can probably say the same. However, there are various ways of approximating the experience in the comfort of your own home. You could watch some paint dry, for example. Or you could try reading this book.

In other words: Lives in Writing is deeply, will-to-live-drainingly dreary. David Lodge is a big literary name of the kind I’ve always instinctively avoided. But this is a collection of essays on writers, not one of his novels or books on literary theory, and I thought I could learn something from it. I was right: I did. I learnt that my instincts about Lodge were correct:

The name of Frank Kermode first impinged on my consciousness in 1954, when I was a second-year undergraduate reading English at University College London. In our Shakespeare course we had lectures from Winifred Nowottny, who in due course would be a colleague of Frank’s when he occupied the Lord Northcliffe chair at UCL. (“Frank Remembered – by a Kermodian”, pg. 153)

In 1961, aged twenty-six, I was in my second year as Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham University when the Head of Department, Professor Terence Spencer, decided that we ought to have a specialist in American Literature, and accordingly advertised a post for one. (“Malcolm Bradbury: Friend and Writer”, pg. 165)

Can you detect any irony in the phrase “impinged on my consciousness”? Me neither. Does your heart quicken at a title like “Malcolm Bradbury: Friend and Writer”? I hope not. But prose like that is certainly inspirational. It inspired me to create a new verb: to plodge, meaning “to write ploddingly dreary prose in the manner of David Lodge”. I don’t think much of English Literature as an academic subject and Lodge helpfully confirms some of my keyest, corest prejudices. He’s a virtuso of ennui, able to be dreary both at length and in brief. Even the titles of his books shrink the horizon and lower the sky: Language of Fiction; Modes of Modern Writing; Working with Structuralism; After Bakhtin; Write On.

Would I rather read a Will Self novel than one of those? It’s frightening that the thought even occurs to me. But I’ll say this for Lodge: he’s not as bad as Terry Eagleton or Christopher Hitchens. Those two are gasbags bloated with self-importance and self-righteousness, spectacularly, sky-swallowingly bad writers. And Lodge himself might agree. After all, he tries to let a little gas out of Eagleton in his review of After Theory (2003):

There are sentences that should never have got past the first draft on his computer screen, let alone into print, like: ‘Much of the world as we know it, despite its solid, well-uphoulstered appearance, is of recent vintage.’ (In the next sentence this uphoulstered vintage is thrown up by tidal waves.) (“Terry Eagleton’s Goodbye to All That”, pg. 131)

But he praises Eagleton too and salutes the “brilliant generation of French intellectuals” – Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault et al – who were “key figures” in the evolution of modern literary theory. So I’m pleased that he devotes a long essay to Graham Greene and mentions Evelyn Waugh only in passing. That’s the way I would have wanted it. There’s an essay about Kingsley Amis too, which is also good. Alas, William Burroughs doesn’t get plodged, but you can’t have everything. However, you can have a wet Sunday in Hartlepool, metaphorically speaking. Just try Lives in Writing.

Christopher Hitchens died as he lived: writing badly. And raising a lot of questions. Why did intelligent people, some of whom write much better than he did, heap so much praise on him? “Characteristic of his elegant wit,” said the Times of this final brief book. The Irish Times called its author “unremittingly elegant, a master of elegant prose”. Elegant? Elephantine is more like it. As a sample of Hitchens’ execrable style, try this:

…kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system (part I, pg. 7)

Why did “bag of poison” become “venom sack”? Why not simply say “bag of poison” and then “the bag”? Because Hitch followed the adolescent – and irritating – rule of varying words for the sake of it or out of a mistaken fear of boring the reader. Fowler called that rule “elegant variation”. He was being ironic. Which is ironic, because Hitch was supposed to be a master of irony.

He wasn’t. He was a master of pomposity and plodding platitude. For me, he was the Tony Blair of journalism: an untalented and unoriginal man who enjoyed success far beyond his merits. True, there is some good writing here, but Hitchens wasn’t responsible for any of it. Nor was Graydon Carter, an editor of Hitch’s who wrote the introduction. No, the only good writing appears in the afterword by Hitch’s wife Carol Blue:

By the time I saw him standing at the stage entrance of the 92nd Street Y that evening, he and I – and we alone – knew that he might have cancer. We embraced in a shadow that only we saw and chose to defy. We were euphoric. He lifted me up and we laughed. (Afterword, pg. 96)

Carol Blue knows how to play the instrument of English. Her late husband didn’t. She can conjure reality. He couldn’t. But she increases the puzzle of Hitchens’s bad writing not just by doing what he didn’t and couldn’t. Hitch liked Waugh and Wodehouse, but refused to follow their literary example and write well. He also failed to learn anything from three more very good writers, as Blue reveals here:

Slightly down the page he wrote what he wanted me to bring from our guesthouse in Houston:

Nietzsche, Mencken and Chesterton books. (Afterword, pg. 100)

How could Hitchens read those three and still write so badly? Elsewhere Blue offers a glimpse into something that helps explain it: the smugness and self-satisfaction of Hitch’s life and world:

At home at one of the raucous, joyous, impromptu eight-hour dinners we often found ourselves hosting, where the table was so crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents and children that elbows were colliding and it was hard to find a space to put down a glass of wine, my husband would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny twenty minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause, and jokes. “How good it is to be us,” he would say in his perfect voice. (Afterword, pp. 94-5)

That “perfect voice” is part of the key to Hitchens’ success, I think. Americans appear to be suckers for a Brit with a posh accent and lots of self-confidence. Moving to the US was the best thing Hitch ever did for his career, because he could play the role of patrician intellectual and polemicist much better over there.

And once there, as he described in Hitch-22, he made friends with other pseuds and windbags, like the late Susan Sontag, also hugely self-confident, also hugely over-rated. She is also an example of how Hitch’s Jewishness was a factor in his success, I think. His maternal ancestry was much more evident in him than in his conservative brother Peter, a better writer and thinker who has fully rejected his youthful Trotskyism, not transmuted it into neo-conservatism as Hitch did. But Peter is pricklier and much less good as schmoozing than Hitch was. He hasn’t attached himself to a powerful clique and propagandized for it, so he wouldn’t have departed on a wave of eulogy and affection if he’d died instead.

I don’t think Hitch deserved the eulogy. The affection is another matter: that’s personal, not public. There was obloquy from some too, but although I disliked and disagreed with him I didn’t like the way he died. It’s wrong to want someone to have a painful and unpleasant death because you disagree with them. I don’t believe in free will and I don’t think that consciousness is responsible for our choices. It’s only consciousness that suffers, not the part of us that chooses.

Hitch bore his own suffering bravely and without abandoning his principles: “If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does” (pg. 91). That’s not funny or original, but he did at least try. He tried to write well about dying too, but he didn’t succeed. I found that a relief, because cancer is an unpleasant and frightening thing. That’s a final unintended irony of a literary life that will, I predict, look smaller and more misguided with the years.

If we could always do exactly what we wanted, life would be less interesting and we’d discover much less. That applies to literature too. I wanted something to read, but I didn’t want to try this particular book. Nevertheless, faute de mieux, I did. And I’m glad I did, even though I didn’t like most of the essays in it. Too many of them seemed arch and affected, written to fill paper and earn money, not to say anything important or interesting. Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt are big names and were big disappointments. Robert Louis Stevenson is an even bigger name and was an even bigger disappointment. His essays don’t seem to live up to his fiction.

Perhaps I should be forced to try those essays again, because first impressions are often wrong. But even if I’ve missed something good there, I’ve found something good elsewhere. More than one essay was good, but one would have been enough to justify reading this book. I’d never heard of Arthur Clutton-Brock (1868–1924) before, but his essay on “The Defects of English Prose” was one of the most interesting I’ve ever read. I thought it would be about grammar and semantics; it was actually about style and personality. I like his ambition and confidence. He surveys centuries of one of the world’s great literatures and finds them wanting:

Yet still one dreams of a prose that has never yet been written in English, though the language is made for it and there are minds not incapable of it, a prose dealing with the greatest things quietly and justly as men deal with them in their secret meditations, seeming perhaps to wander, but always advancing in an unbroken sequence of thought, with a controlled ardor of discovery and the natural beauties of a religious mind. Johnson might have written it, if he had had a stronger sense of beauty and more faith in the flights of reason; Newman, if he had been a greater master of words and less afraid of his own questioning; Henry James, if he had exercised his subtlety on larger things. The best of our prose writers, living or dead, are not civilized enough or too much in love with something else, or not enough in love with anything, to write the prose we dream of. The English Plato is still to be. (“The Defects of English Prose”)

I’ve not liked Plato when I’ve tried him, but that is a thought-provoking judgment and Clutton-Brock makes it with skill and subtlety. J.B. Priestley’s essays were good too, though I started them not expecting much. Evelyn Waugh didn’t like him, after all, and though Waugh’s essays are better – and should have been represented here – Priestley is obviously worth more attention. I already knew the same about G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), but I’ve been neglecting his writing for too long. This book has shown me so, because I thought Chesterton’s three essays – “A Defence of Nonsense”, “A Piece of Chalk” and “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” – were the best things in it. He is a very good and very vivid writer whose writing seems impervious to age and fashion.

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1954) comes straight after Chesterton – they were two cheeks of one arse, someone once said about their shared Catholicism and anti-modernism – and he suffers by comparison. I still enjoyed his defence of “Crooked Streets” against rational town-planning and its destructiveness and arrogance. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who begins the book, is one of the few essayists in English who don’t suffer by comparison with Chesterton. He’s not as vivid or easy to read, but he’s still someone who illuminates the world and makes you glad to be part of it.